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Todd Skinner is a world-class rock climber and renowned
motivational speaker whose Beyond the Summit: Setting and Surpassing
Extraordinary Business Goals (Portfolio, $24.95) contains
beautifully written accounts of daring climbs. His explanations of
how to apply 40 life-and-death lessons of mountaineering to the
dollars-and-cents world of business are, however, sometimes
confusing at first sight.

Take No. 26, for instance: "Always fall toward the
summit." What could that mean? Skinner explains you should aim
to push yourself into the unknown and see that, if you do fail, you
learn enough to better your chances next time. Skinner's
unusual ideas and unsurpassed wealth of high-altitude leadership
experience make this an interesting and helpful read for
entrepreneurs looking for offbeat inspirations.

Uncharted Territory
Bill Davidson is no mountaineer. He's a Harvard-educated
business consultant who spent 10 years researching 70 companies
from Amazon to Dell to create Breakthrough: How Great Companies Set Outrageous
Objectives-and Achieve Them (John Wiley & Sons,
$27.95). So although his book is similarly aimed at helping
businesses achieve outstanding accomplishments, his approach is
more mainstream.

Davidson advises entrepreneurs to set outrageous objectives and
to use creative thinking about customer care, cost reduction and
other variables to reach customers. He points to one manufacturing
company suffering under a mountain of debt that started giving
employees cash bonuses every time its working-capital needs
declined sharply. Soon the company freed up enough cash to pay its
debts. Then the CEO set a new outrageous objective-to have negative
working capital.

These books present very different approaches to the same
challenge. But whether you're climbing sheer granite faces or
facing rock-solid competitors, one of them will help you on your
way.